Poets

Lee Ann Roripaugh

Lee Ann Roripaugh was born in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1965. She holds an MM in music history, a BM in piano performance, and an MFA in creative writing, all from Indiana University.

Her first volume of poetry, Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin Books, 1999), was selected by Ishmael Reed for the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed, 2019), Dandarians (Milkweed Editions, 2014), On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), and Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose.

Roripaugh’s other honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize, an AWP Intro Award, and the 1995 Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize.

In his review of On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, Ray Gonzalez wrote, "Lee Ann Roripaugh’s poems create a true book of seeing. Her poems show us the way toward redemption as they fill these pages with a life of discovery and meaning.”

In 2015, Roripaugh was appointed to the position of South Dakota poet laureate. She teaches creative writing at the University of South Dakota and is the editor of the South Dakota Review.

some say moonscape, or otherworldy, as if to mean something alien,sandwiched between the banality of kitschy Sinclair station dinosaursand Wall Drug’s ubiquitous billboards

I think not moonscape but earthscape, not otherworldly, but innerworldy,not alien, but indigenous, as in always already from and ofas in sovereign, as in not ours

*

unexpected wingbeat, talon, and spray of gold flint-sparking the lightwhen one of the golden eagles surfing currents near Sharps Formation by Castle Trailplummets to swoop in front of my Jeep

its sharp-eyed, curious gaze catches me gawking through the windshield, and suddenlyI’m no longer the voyeur, but the spied upon, and before it kites skyward againI am, in those seconds, all spotlit halo, golden blaze

*

a cottontail backlit by sunset, thin-membraned ears glowingwith the hot orange of tea-light’s flicker behind glass, has its picture takenby a happy group of Chinese tourists

for a brief moment, the cottontail is simultaneously framed withinthe bright rectangles of five iPhones, all lit up within the bright rectangle of my iPhone:molten-eared bunnies within bunnies / #meta

someone breaks a pottery bowl in slow motion: can you imagine the apocalyptic scatterof ammonites and clams, the beautiful wreckage of an ocean’s millennial spillfrom a mountain-cracked basin of broken raku?

I grew delicately-feathered luna moth antennae to fine-tune your emotional weather: sometimes a barometric shift in the house’s atmosphere / a tight quickening / some hard dark shadow flickering glossy as obsidian pulled down like a nightshade behind your irises / but sometimes you struck with no warning at all rattlesnaked fang of lightning incinerating my moon-pale wings to crumpled cinder and ash

now your memory resets itself every night / a button clearing the trip odometer back to zero / dim absinthe fizz of radium-green glow from the dashboard half-lifing a midnight rollover from omega to alpha to omega

I remember when you told me (maybe I was three?) I was mentally damaged like the boy across the street / said you’d help me pass for normal so no one would know but only if I swore to obey you / and only you / forever

now your memory fins around and around / like the shiny obsessive lassos of a goldfish gold-banding the narrow perimeters of its too-small bowl

coming home from school (maybe I was fifteen?) you were waiting for me just inside the front door / accused me of stealing a can of corned beef hash from the canned goods stashed in the basement / then beat me in the face with your shoe

how do I admit I’m almost glad of it? that I’ve always pined for you like an unrequited love / though I was never beautiful enough for you / your tinned bright laugh shrapneled flecks of steel to hide your anger when people used to say we looked like one another

but now we compare our same dimpled hands / the thick feathering of eyebrows with the same crooked wing birdwinging over our left eye / our uneven cheekbones making one half of our face rounder than the other / one side a full moon / the other side a shyer kind of moon

how can I admit I’m almost glad of it when you no longer recognize yourself in photographs the mirror becoming stranger until one day—will it be soon?— you’ll look in my face / once again seeing nothing of yourself reflected in it, and—unsure of all that you were and all that you are—ask me: who are you?